The Lemonheads' frontman Shares on Substance Abuse: 'Some People Were Meant to Take Drugs – and I Was One'
The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a line of faint marks along his forearm, subtle traces from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to get decent track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly see it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and emits a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”
Dando, one-time indie pin-up and key figure of 1990s alternative group his band, appears in decent shape for a person who has used every drug going from the age of 14. The songwriter behind such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely candid. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move our chat to a bar. In the end, he orders for two pints of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Often drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into wild tangents. It's understandable he has stopped owning a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is too all over the place. I just want to read all information at the same time.”
Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing quite well so far.” Now 58, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take LSD sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”
Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I think certain individuals were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”
One advantage of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But now he is about to launch Love Chant, his debut record of original band material in nearly 20 years, which contains flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly heard of this kind of hiatus in a career,” he comments. “This is a Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have standards about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until I was ready, and now I'm prepared.”
Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the title is a nod to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, heady, fitfully eye-watering account of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I authored the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out given his disorganized way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to secure a good publisher. And it gets me out there as someone who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”
Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it symbolizes a time before life got difficult by substances and fame. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “stood out. There were few restrictions except no skating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and started a group in the mid-80s. His band began life as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and Ramones; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they released three albums. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a solo project, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.
In the early 1990s, the band signed to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the noise in preference of a increasingly melodic and mainstream folk-inspired sound. This was “because the band's Nevermind was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he says. “Upon hearing to our early records – a track like Mad, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his somber vocal style. The title was taken from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a individual named Ray who had strayed from the path.
The subject was not the only one. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him among the fifty sexiest individuals alive. He cheerfully rebuffs the notion that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying too much enjoyment.
Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. His memoir, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he failed to turn up for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an unplanned live performance to a hostile audience who jeered and threw objects. But that proved small beer next to what happened in Australia soon after. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances
